As Christians everywhere grow ever more excited at the approach
of their main holiday of the year, and for reasons all their own,
non-Christians make preparations to join the Christians in
celebration of the birth of the Christians' savior, it's time to
shop.

Though my last Buyer's Guide was rather a success (those
Babblin' Boo Dolls sold out in days and the price skyrockeded on
eBay -- congrats to those who followed my advice), this Guide is
different. As part of the ongoing War Against Hacking, I offer
this Adequacy Un-Buyer's Guide, for those with a teen on their
Christmas list who you fear could be falling in with hacker
terrorists and is asking for hacker guides to help him build his
hacking "skillz".

Any young "hup" as they are called (meaning "hacker pup" in the
underground lingo) will want to begin his training from both a
theoretical and practical standpoint. For practical hacking, there
is no more dangerous guide to mischief and mayhem than the
infamous "**el book". The "**el book", or more correctly *rogra**ing
P***l (*rd Edition) by Larr* Wa*l, *om C**istians*n, and
*on *rwant, is a virtual beginner's spell book of the wicked craft
of hacking. You are sure to have the "hups" in your family
clamoring for their own copy, or a replacement for the use-worn copy
they may already have fallen under the dark shadow of. If you are
asked for this book, or see it in some irresponsible bookseller's
stall, DO NOT BUY IT! And seriously consider what you are doing
shopping in such an establishment.

Instead, consider buying the
little "hup" his very own 6"
Lord of the Rings Figure 5-Pack Value Bundle #2. Now I know
this isn't really a buyer's guide, but I just can't resist
mentioning that this beautiful set of collectible action figures
is absolutely GUARANTEED to be worth $150 or more a year from now,
and will continue to appreciate in all the years to come. So
while you are saving your son or nephew from a life of vandalism,
crime, federal prison, and eternal damnation, you can also be
helping to secure his financial future. And yours as well,
if you pick one up for yourself.

Now, I hate to digress even further, but I'm sure you have noticed
that I don't print the complete titles of these appallingly diabolical
books or their gangster authors. If you stop and think, you'll
easily realize why. This is an UN-Buyer's Guide, meant to steer
responsible adults away from books that could poison a young mind.
But unfortunately, many unenlightened parents and reckless schools and
libraries lack decent Internet
filtering,nor do they record their child's Internet usage for parental
review. So this very Un-Buyer's Guide could be used by the many
hackers and "hups" who sometimes find their way to Adequacy as a sort
of reading list, by simply ignoring my advice and buying exactly the
opposite of what I recommend. By keeping the titles vague, yet still
recognizable if you see them in your child's letter to Santa, this is
prevented. For the same reason, I have carefully disabled Adequacy's
proprietary automatic linkification system, to prevent any links to
unscrupulous booksellers from being inserted, defeating the entire
purpose of this Guide.

There. Now back to the the un-shopping list.

Wickedness: ease of use and reliability

Just as important as practice, theory is a critical concern for
an aspiring hacker. Although there are many places a "hup" can find
the foundational ideas that the amoral hacker ethos is built on, there
as single dark volume that towers above the others in this City of Dis
of corrupt literature: it is Th*
My****** Ma*-Mo*** by the anti-Solomon himself, *rederick
*. *rooks. *rooks was perhaps the seminal hacker, and his years of
experience are distilled into a toxic extract of the worst kind in
this thin yet information-rich tract. These are the ideas that will
turn a skilled yet poorly strategizing "hup" into a super-hacker, one
whose "success" will go beyond mere expellation from school and rise to
the level of Federally-prosecuatable offenses. Don't let *rooks lead
your boy down that path.

There are several other books that pose the same kind
of threat to boys at a crossroads in their
adolescence: they do not just teach hacking; they
teach a kind of mega-hacking. Hack-fu, they call it.
While you are shielding his eyes from books with
humped beasts on the covers, don't accidentally let
his gaze fall on this innocently named little viper:
The
Des*gn of Ev*ryday Th*ngs, also known as The
*sychology of Ev**yday Th*ngs in its hard back
abomination. You wouldn't think at first that these
guides to interface design have anything to do with
writing malicious code, but even in the dog-eat-dog
world of cutthroat hacking, the human being enters the
equation. The Osama bin Ladens of hacking take this
into account, and set up their snares and tricks with
ease of use and minimal human error as fundamental
design considerations.

If you really want your boy to know good design when
he sees it, buy him this fantastically designed Lord
of the Rings Ring
Wraith and Horse, along with an Arwen
with Asfaloth. Getting both gives you a
collectible SET, and having sets is what it's ALL
about for the smart investor.

Mayhem and
Debauchery: advanced methods

What is not
a smart investment is buying your impressionable young
one a copy of the infamous "D*ill B**k", or more
properly, U**X
P*ower T**ls. Everything an aspiring
terrorist wants to know about the foundational hacker
environment is in this infernal book. Like many of
the worst influences in our society, it is published
by O*Reilly, which is the Al Jazeera of hacking. This
hacker propaganda outfit also puts out the "D*ill
B**k's" partner in crime, the "R*d B**k", formerly the
"P*rpl* B**k", officially, U**x *y*tem
*dministratio*. These two books are unique in
that few hackers actually read them, because they are
too hard. But they love to own a copy, and especially
the love to tell other hackers they own a copy.
Without getting into a deep ethnology, let's just say
that hacker culture is lousy with mythology, ritual,
totems, taboos and twisted rites of passage. These
books are hacker totems, and make good paperweights,
doorstops and bookends as well.

There are more of course. "The
T*ger *ook", for example, is simply a work of pure
evil, and I mean that from the heart. I swear every
page was spat straight from the maw of hell. Or
anti-American fiction like M*cro*erfs.
I call it the "how to hate what made your country
great book." There is an unbelievable volume of
fiction to feed the feverish hacker imagination, by
such degenerates as W*ll*am G*bs*n and B**ce S**rl*ng.
You'll be asked to pick up N*ur*manc*r,
for example, or Crypt*nomic*n,
or perhaps even Th*
D*f*er*nc* *ng*ne, which, while utterly
corrupting, is not a bad little book, especially if
you've never read a high-tech science fiction
historical novel.

If you're wise, however, you'll steer completely clear of all such "cyberpunk" trash, and read and share books of morality and virtue. If you want a potential "hup" to learn morality, get him a copy of the very book that explains moraity: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant. It's all in there.

That is enough to keep the worst influences out of the
kid's life, but it's only a start. Keep your browser
tuned to Adequacy for more
forbidden books. And more hot collecting buys, such
as this fine set: a 12"
Lord of the Rings Frodo and a 12"
Lord of the Rings Gandalf. What makes these so
collectible is not just the quality and the beauty of
the art. It's the scale. These are big, and big
means big dollars on the collectible market.

Don't forget: buy the complete set. Merry Christmas
Christians, and non-Christians too who are participating,
for what reason I myself cannot fathom.

If you are unfortunate enough to have let your son degenerate into a hacking terrorist, then there is yet still hope to turn him back into a good, productive citizen. Takedown is an excellent novel written by the very man who tracked down the nation's most dangerous computer hacker. I'd recommend it for all children who have taken on such dangerous habits as attacking government computers with **erl or using hacker tools like telnet to read web pages.

If he is so dangerous, then why are they trying to take away his Ham License? Everyone needs to eat.

This particular one sounds like a conspiracy to me. I don't think he was a hacker. I think the government got him to cover up their own tracks. He doesn't seem very smart anyway - but maybe that's what hackers are like.

First of all, the tedious details about how Adequacy's "worker bees" go about their net-work "engineering" labors are not terribly interesting to me. I am thinking about the fate of our civilization, and whether some nameless drudge in the bowels of Adequacy HQ at some forgotten date decided to take a "short cut" by using a snippet of hacker code in one of his daily chores is just not relevant. Perhaps a note to his supervisor suggesting that the lad try to act a bit more professional in the future is in order, but even at that, should I really get mired in unknotting the mundane little foul-ups in the "grunt work" portion of Adequacy's operations? Does it have anything to do with Computer Science? With Art? With the future of Civilization?

Next you'll be berating me because my plumber uses an "open source" monkey wrench or the bag boy at the local market read O*Reilly's "Paper or Plastic?" In a Nutshell or some such thing.

Second, though he may be somewhat lacking in judgment as to what is a proper programming language, and what is "line noise" as these tradesmen say, Adequacy and it's workers are in fact a professional operation, and not a band of drug-addled teens out defacing web sites and stealing credit card numbers on their way to commit another mass-murder/suicide rampage at the local high school. Being professionals, they have a legitimate need to have access to knowledge that would be unconscionable to hand over to an amateur or a teenager.

Unlike drug-addled, dirty hippie hackers with their fascistic Randian Lunix that doesn't work because they are so sloppy, WE here at Adequacy never fail to do our absolute best to produce the highest-quality web site on the web, and never skimp on the most trivial detail.

As far as my post being "idiotic", I would suggest that perhaps my post was too CONTROVERSIAL for you and you just can't handle the controversey. Such is an occupational hazard here at Adequacy. HTH

I never find adequacy.org at all informative or controversal, the authors are horribly misinformed about whatever they are talking about (from politics to computer science). I read through these and I don't understand what they are trying to do. If its supposed to be a "real people's opinion" alternative to the sugarcoated media news ("News for Grownups"), the things they decide to put on the front page show their lack of professionalism and that a bunch of writers who went through lobotomy are not prepared to challenge or call themselves "better" than the mainstream. Sorry about that last part I'm tired I was up all last night playing the quake

On the topic of dangerous literature... (5.00 / 2) (#11)

by Anonymous Reader on Sat Dec 22nd, 2001 at 02:13:59 PM PST

Browsing through various web archives, I stumbled upon this apparently still unreleased title. Surely the folks at O*Riley have crossed the line this time.

I have, um, read somewhere that most male actors in the erotic cinema are quite short. Diminutive stature can be hidden by the camera, and a small frame tends to make otherwise respectable equipment look fearsome indeed in proportion.

Now that I think about it, I don't seem to recall what exactly Frodo did for a living before he was shanghaied into carting around stolen jewelry...

Yes it is if done in a non destructive way.
In actual fact the best books to teach hacking are the ones written by security companies which tell you how to safeguard your network.
You know like, Maximum Security or Hacking Exposed. While those books teach you how to defend your computer, they also are giving you ideas on how hackers operate. These books even admit they can be misused but for the sake of helping people to secure their networks they have to be written.
That rule goes for all hacker material - it is always useful, informative GOOD stuff which is mis-used. In the same way that if someone wrote a "how to hack" book which got really in depth, network administrators would buy it and use the info in it to make their network more secure.
This is also true for software. The best hacking tools for Novell Networks has got to be the administration programs which come with it.

If all the books hackers used were banned we wouldnt have much of an internet left.

<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

get rid of all books that can be used for crime??? (none / 0) (#23)

by Anonymous Reader on Mon Dec 24th, 2001 at 08:33:22 PM PST

I'll forgo pointing out the fact that the majority of the people writing articles for this site have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT, especially with respect to computers and "hacking," to point out some other random thing...if you seriously want to get rid of books that contain information that may be used for illegal activities (be they "hacking," making bombs, or whatever), then you'd need to get rid of just about every book in existence. Take the bible for instance...it contains graphic depictions of violence, war, rape, and so on. People may (and some indeed have, serial killers especially...) use it as a template for various crimes. Therefore, following your logic (unless you are a total hypocrite, which I suspect you are), the bible must also be banned, as should all history books which discuss things like ancient battles/wars, Nazism, WWII, and so on...and well, pretty much any book in existence. The point is, all books do is serve as a repository for information...what people do with the info is THEIR CHOICE. Some people will choose to use the info for a legitimate purpose, while others will choose to use it for various illegal things, but just because people may use the info to break the law is not grounds for banning the source material...that sort of opinion stems from a fascist mentality, and FASCISTS SUCK!

PS: You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about w/ respect to computers and "hackers," so in the future, please try and write about something else.

The article you think you read did not suggest banning any books. The article suggested that you not buy dangerous books for children. It was a guide, an UN-buyer's guide, to be specific. The only place the word "ban" was written was in your own mind. It does not say "get rid of". It says maybe you should choose to purchase something else. I offer suggestions to adults who do not wish to give young people with undeveloped abilities to make jugements books that they would use to get themselves into trouble. Incidentally, I would not give a Bible to a child either, for reasons such as you suggest. I think taken to seriously, the Bible can lead one into as much mischief as P***l in a Nutsh*ll.

I suggest before you attempt to follow my logic, as you say, you should attempt first to follow what the words in front of you actually say. Should you like to develop your ability to read and understand what you read better, I can offer no better book for you than The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant.

Best of luck with that.

I do, I do, I do--Bikini Kill

True, you don't say ban... (none / 0) (#25)

by Anonymous Reader on Mon Dec 24th, 2001 at 11:46:18 PM PST

...but a large part of my post was also in reply to someone else's post (they were replying to another person's reply) in which they said something like "...oh, and I bet you think that the anarchists cookbook is okay too...," which, in my opinion, clearly indicates that they would be in favor of banning certain forms of literature...my post was more of a reply to this close-minded comment than it was to your article, most of which I simply skimmed over as it got kind of long-winded and the asterisks were annoying (and ineffectual, since the links take you to the appropriate sites anyways...well, the few links that I bothered to test did...). But then, what kid would seriously ask for a computer systems manual for X-mas? Anyone that would do that probably already knows everything they need to know to be a "hacker," (lol...gotta love how that term gets thrown around here...and how often it is totally mis-represented) and thus it would be completely irrelevant whether the book was purchased or not. Only someone who can already "hack" would ask for a dry, boring peice of "hacker" literature for the holidays...

And I am quite familiar with the works of Kant, as well as those of Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche, to name only a few...

So who was it who taught you to post replies to things you haven't read criticizing approximations of other things that you also haven't read very closely? Would that be Nietzsche or Camus? Surely not Kant? I would expect Kant would actually read what he is complaining about, and would direct his replies there, rather than at some nearby but different article or post. Nothing I have written even mentions this "anarchists cookbook". A quick search turns up this comment by phillipm.

So while I am of course simply bowled over with awe at the formidable intellect of someone who is familiar with not only Kant, but three other philosophers, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche, I have to say the impression of intelligence you seek to create is just a little tarnished. I could forgive maybe if you were somewhat confused as to which of my statements you were upset about, but to mix me up with a completely different person is suggests you have been drinking alcohol (I'm trying to be charitable).

Hopefully when you sober up, you will not only realize your mistake, but cease defending it, as if your random spewage of of-the-wall accusations at me or whoever is in the vicinity were anything but an embarrasment.

Kant, Sartre, Camus and Nietzsche indeed. Heh.

I do, I do, I do--Bikini Kill

such blatant sarcasm... (none / 0) (#29)

by Anonymous Reader on Tue Dec 25th, 2001 at 12:55:46 AM PST

I didn't "confuse" you with philipm, nor did I "mix up" the posts, I simply didn't care where my post went, so I posted a reply to the main article...since philipm's view is really just a more extreme version of yours, I figured that there was no real harm...I guess I forgot about how some people love to nitpick about little things.

Sartre - Life is what the individual makes of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Camus - Same as Sartre exceptly deeply concerned with suicide.

Kant - Reality only exists because the human mind beleives it exists.

Nieszsche - The opinions that editors of some website have w/ respect to my intelligence is of no consequence.

and if you're impressed with that, I also am familiar with several classic Greek philosophers, and a few other contemporary ones.

So how is it that you carry on conversations? Like if the guy across the room says that he likes gin and tonic, and the one next to you asks if the game is about to come on (I'm guessing a drinking situation would be closest to your experience) you just "don't care" which of the two guys said what? You would just say to the guy next to you, "Gin? I hate gin. Give me a headache. What's wrong with you?"

I guess since the cleverest thing you can think of to say about Camus is that he is the "same as Sartre exceptly deeply concerned with suicide" this is generally how you operate. Why bother with the differences, right? They're both these French guys or something, right?

You are clearly inadequate. Please go back to Slashdot or Plastic or wherever it is that they think you are an authority on philosophers, and how they are all pretty much the same. Now go away.

Several classic greek philosophers, my rotund ass. And, come to think of it, his orotund asininity. What do you think, elenchos? Is he going to attack from Anaxagoras or Zeno of Alexandria? Maybe he means Socrates and Plato, eh wot?

Observe my summary of Rand: "Deeply concerned with capitalism." No, wait, I can do better. "Same as Locke but deeply concerned with Adam Smith." How about "The human mind only exists because reality exists?"

I say we put this dude's posts on the buzz page and kick them around like footballs for months.

Your ignorance reminds meat of when I was beat up and disfigured by a third grade bully. I hope he later commited more crimes and got the death penalty in Texas - the only state with courage enough to stand behind its laws.

Please stop attacking me ad-hominem. That is the classic sign of a troll and I hope the editors are monitoring this and that they IP ban you. Strong measures for horrible destructive trolls, that never do any good, are appropriate.

Now, to your point. Do you think distributing nuclear information to Osama bin Laden is OK? That's one book that should be banned RIGHT AWAY. And burned, while we are at it. Your right to "freedom from speech" extends only as far as my nose.

... in Kierkegaard where he comments that genuine doubt takes a lifetime of cultivation. I actually believe that you have sat before books of these philosophers and browsed their words with your eyes. I don't believe you have stayed up at nights, tossing over them.

Why, the presumption of the h4x0r type is just intolerable. Isn't it just lovely how they're all qualififed humanities scholars? If I were to leaf through a few books on C++, would I be able to claim competence as a programmer? To study the humanities takes years of dedication and self-criticism, not simply the casual, peremptory browsing of a couple of randomly-selected works from the greats.

Nathan "I am quite familiar with the works of Knuth and Stroustrop, to name a few"

PS - The point of reading Sartre isn't to facilely summarize his views. You should realize that to do that is to project his views into a framework of your own, and that any criticism you could then muster (positive or negative) would simply be an expression of your prejudices. The point of reading Sartre is to absorb it on the experiential level, which would prevent you from ever being satisfied by your pissant little undergraduate writeup.

Your "hacking" wouldn't work unless you applied the literature to a praxis. What makes you think that philosophy can? Right, it's a liberal arts discipline for people too dumb to go into CS. You're nauseating.

First of all, can't you even spell Nachoes. I assume you called yourself after your favorite food. Please take more trouble to read then name of the condiment.

Secondly, how large is the step between calling something evil and banning it? Really? If you had absorbed anything from Kant you would have understood tha logic is a tool that is misused often and that an errant logical argument can drive people mad - i.e. Nietzsche.

The earliest versions were called PEARL (Practical Extraction And Reporting Language). The A got dropped later.

Regarding the One Proper Way of spelling perl, there are three versions: the acronym way (PERL), the name way (Perl), and the command way (perl). There are four approachesto what version is The One: one for each version, and one that it doesn't matter as all three ways mean the same thing. Personally, I am a member of the fourth group.

i find it quite entertaining that you think that people cant figgure out what the words are when you dropped only a few letters from them , and you listed the authors in the same method, just about anyone could figgured that one out.

Listen (none / 0) (#51)

by Anonymous Reader on Tue May 28th, 2002 at 07:00:18 AM PST

Hey fuckstick.... You are so fucking stupid. Your list of "Hacking books" is basically the list of books that describe what keeps the internet alive today. I hope I meet you some day so I can kick your ass.

Thanks

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